One Last Breath

19

Out and About was one of the newer outdoor equipment shops on the main street in Hathersage. After speaking to a member of staff, Ben Cooper and Gavin Murfin collected a tape from their security system. The visit didn’t take long, and left them plenty of time to take a look at Hathersage station. Cooper remembered where it was, having seen the approach road from the back of the Moorland estate, where Mrs Quinn lived.

The station car park looked full, so he pulled up at the side of the road near a row of bungalows. He was surprised by the extent of the development that had been taking place here — Hathersage Park, it was called. He could see a long row of new business units stretching past the station itself, many of them already in use.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Murfin.

‘I want to have a look at the station, in case there’s any way Quinn might have been seen on the platform.’

‘I think I’ll stay here with the car, then.’

Cooper looked around. There was nowhere selling food, so it was probably safe.

‘OK, Gavin.’

He walked through a tunnel and up a ramp to the Manchester line. Not only was the station unmanned, but there wasn’t much station to speak of — just two platforms, with a small concrete shelter on each side. First North Western had provided a payphone on the Sheffield side, but that was about it. It was bad luck there were no CCTV cameras covering the platforms, but he supposed crime was more likely to happen down in the car park.

Cooper examined the train timetables. Judging by the time of the sighting of Mansell Quinn, he must have left his mother’s house in Moorland Avenue by seven fifteen. It was only a short walk to the station, and there was a train towards Manchester at seven thirty-three, so Quinn must have waited for a quarter of an hour, perhaps on the platform.

But when had he left Rebecca Lowe’s house? And did he leave the area by train? There were two services in either direction that he could have caught, but the times of the later trains meant Quinn would have had to stay in the house for some time with the body — or found somewhere else to be out of sight.

Turning, Cooper looked across the car park to the new development. At the far end was a complex of apartments and penthouses. They looked perfect for affluent commuters, who could reach the centre of Sheffield by train in twenty minutes or so, yet still enjoy a rural view. Next to them were business units, and across from the corner of the car park, a health and fitness centre. Its front wall consisted mostly of glass on the upper storey, with two big, arched windows reaching from floor to ceiling.

Cooper felt a sudden surge of interest. He could see a woman in a black sweatshirt and leggings exercising on a treadmill. She was striding out vigorously on the moving surface, doing a good five miles an hour he reckoned. There was a console in front of her that probably displayed her time, speed, distance, calories, pulse and maybe even her heart rate. It was one of a row of machines lined up in the window — and they were all facing outwards.

He jogged back down the ramp, and found Murfin starting to doze in the car.

‘Gavin, you might want to visit the fitness centre over there.’

‘Visit a fitness centre? Me?’

‘Look — see the woman on the treadmill up there?’

Murfin looked up. ‘Oh, yeah. She’s not bad. Well spotted, Ben.’

‘She has a great view of the platform — or she would have, if she took her eyes off her console. And anyone using those machines on Monday evening would have been able to see Mansell Quinn boarding the train.’

‘So you want me to go and talk to a load of women in leotards and tight shorts?’

‘If you can manage that.’

‘Manage it? It’s what God made me for. But what are you going to do?’

‘Take a little train ride.’

‘A what?’

‘I can’t stop to explain, Gavin — there’s a Manchester train due in two minutes. I’ll be back in not much above an hour.’

When a pair of diesel units appeared around a curve in the track, Cooper was the only passenger waiting to get on. Realizing he ought to let Diane Fry know what he was doing, he checked his mobile. No signal. And the payphone was on the other side of the track — no time to get across and back before the train came. Oh, well. He could explain later.

On the train, a guard wearing a uniform of shirt, tie and checked jacket in three different shades of blue charged him a couple of pounds, then had to tap a lot of buttons on the metal box strapped round his neck to produce a ticket. At Bamford, Cooper watched him operate the doors and step out on to the platform to see passengers on and off before signalling the driver.

The train crossed the River Derwent on a bridge of steel girders just before it slowed to enter Hope station. Cooper looked at his watch. The journey from Hathersage to Hope had taken just seven minutes. DI Hitchens had been right so far — it would have been ridiculously easy for Mansell Quinn to get here from his mother’s house in Moorland Avenue.

To cross the tracks at Hope, Cooper had to climb a set of wooden steps on to an iron footbridge where two men with cameras were standing. They must be waiting for express trains to come through, because they didn’t look interested in the diesel units that had just pulled away.

He soon found a path that led into trees and through a kissing gate before heading up the hill to Aston. A stone barn with a corrugated-iron roof stood in the middle of a field, adjoining an old cattle shelter full of spray tanks. An ideal place to loiter unseen, if you needed to.

By the time he reached the village, Cooper was breathing hard. But the walk hadn’t been taxing, just short of twelve minutes from the station. And he hadn’t seen a soul, apart from the trainspotters on the footbridge and a few sheep. In another minute or two he would pass right by Rebecca Lowe’s driveway at Parson’s Croft.

A woman came towards him with a Labrador trailing at her heels. She gave him a close look before saying ‘hello’. Cooper knew he didn’t look like the average hiker. If she was a resident, the woman had probably been interviewed already and would be suspicious of strangers.

At Parson’s Croft, a liveried police car was parked on the driveway and a uniformed female officer stood near the front door, but otherwise it was quiet. The press had gone away, moving on to the next news story as soon as the SOCOs and detectives had dispersed.

Rebecca Lowe’s killer wouldn’t have needed to approach the house via the main gate. The hedge around the property was five feet high, but ragged. It consisted largely of elm saplings, which would die before they reached maturity as the beetles that spread Dutch Elm Disease got under their bark. Cooper could have forced his way through in several places. Had the Crime Scene Manager worked on the assumption that the killer had arrived via the obvious route? Or had the weak points in the hedge been examined for fibres left on the branches by someone pushing their way through?

What Cooper really wanted to do was explore the garden, but his presence would have been recorded. In any case, he ought to get back to the station if he was going to catch the train back to Hathersage.

He reached Hope station with five minutes to spare and stood with a group of hikers on the Sheffield platform, listening to an announcement about a delay. Cooper looked round. Nobody seemed to be surprised.

With a shriek and a whine, an express train thundered through. A plate on the locomotive said it was the ‘City of Aberdeen’. The two photographers ran from one side of the bridge to the other to get shots of the train. When it had disappeared around the bend, they began to pack their cameras away. Perhaps they were going for lunch in one of the pubs in Hope.

Cooper gazed around the station. Unlike Hathersage, the platforms here weren’t overlooked. It was well out of the village, and the only vantage point was from the footbridge. On an impulse, he ran up the wooden steps and explained to the photographers what he wanted. He wasn’t very hopeful, but it made sense to cover all the bases while he was here.

‘When did you say?’ asked one.

‘Monday. Between seven thirty and nine in the evening.’

The photographer shook his head and zipped up his bag. But the other man hesitated, reluctant to get involved, or perhaps keen to get started on his lunch.

‘I was here,’ he said.

‘You were?’

‘I live just down the road in Bradwell, and I noticed the light was interesting that night. There were some thunderclouds moving in from the west. Cumulonimbus.’

‘Right.’

‘It made for some nice lighting effects. I knew a Manchester express was due, so I chucked the bag in the car and came down.’

‘You were here, on the bridge?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘What time would you have been in position?’

‘About seven thirty, I suppose. I did a bit of setting up, checked the light meter, put a high-speed film in, and took a few trial shots.’

‘Did you notice anyone on either of the platforms?’

‘On the platforms?’ The photographer looked down from the bridge, as if seeing the platforms for the first time. ‘But they’re waiting for the local trains, aren’t they?’

Cooper sighed, recognizing the fact that the photographer wouldn’t have noticed another human being unless they were there on the footbridge with him, comparing the sizes of their zoom lenses.

‘Have you had the film developed?’ he asked.

‘No, it’s still here in my bag.’

‘Would you let me borrow it? I’ll give you a receipt, and you’ll get free prints from it.’

Cooper heard the first rattle of the approaching Sheffield train, the one that would take him back to Hathersage. He braced himself for an argument that he didn’t have time for.

‘Will it help?’ said the photographer.

‘It might do. I can’t say until we have a look at it.’

The friend was fidgeting impatiently in the background, tapping the iron railing of the bridge. The photographer looked over his shoulder at him. And Cooper saw with relief that he, too, didn’t have time to get into a long argument.

‘Here, you can have it,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’ll come out too well, anyway. The sun was at the wrong angle.’

Diane Fry had more driving to do this afternoon. Just her luck, when she felt so bad and all she wanted to do was stay indoors, away from the pollen. She’d have to leave her car windows closed all the way. Her doctor had told her to avoid freshly-cut grass, but from May onwards the stuff was all around her in the Peak District. First there were silage trailers blocking the roads, and then vast loads of hay bales filling the air with dust. Try keeping that lot out of your car.

Fry had two more people to interview this afternoon — first, Mansell Quinn’s probation officer, and then a convicted burglar called Richard Wakelin, aged twenty-five, who lived in Allestree, on the outskirts of Derby. Wakelin had been the last person to speak to Quinn on his release from HMP Sudbury. She didn’t think that Quinn would have said anything to either of them that would hint at his intentions or where he was heading. But the long shots had to be covered. At the moment, they had no other leads.

On her way through Ashbourne, Fry pulled in at a chemist’s and bought herself some Zirtek antihistamine tablets. She ought to have had pollen-extract injections before the summer started. The tablets would be nowhere near as effective, but at least they’d make life more tolerable.

On the train back to Hathersage, Ben Cooper showed his return ticket to the guard, who simply nodded, making no effort to clip a hole in it or tear it to show the return portion had been used. It didn’t seem quite right to Cooper. It meant he could use the same ticket again later in the day, if he felt like it. That sort of thinking must come from mixing with too many criminals.

He took a closer look at his ticket. It showed the date and time he’d bought it, as well as his starting point and destination. In addition, there was a long serial number — seventeen figures in total. Before he got off at Hathersage, Cooper asked the guard what happened to his ticket machine when he finished his shift.

‘I just hand it in at the office with the money, and collect a new one when I clock on again the next morning.’

‘Thanks.’

Cooper watched him go through his routine, checking passengers on and off the train, closing the doors, giving the driver his signal. A small crowd had got on at Bamford, and the guard hadn’t managed to issue tickets to them all by the time the train arrived in Hathersage.

If the train had been full on the evening that Mansell Quinn had travelled on it, the guard might not have reached him by Bamford, or even Hope. There must be people who managed to take short journeys without ever buying a ticket. It wasn’t likely that the guard would remember one individual who’d ridden two stops on a busy evening run, unless that passenger drew attention to himself.

And a man planning to commit murder wasn’t going to do anything to draw attention to himself, was he?

As Cooper walked back down the ramp to the car park at Hathersage, the smell of garlic was wafting from one of the bungalows. Someone had tied a bouquet of flowers to the station fence as a funeral tribute to a train service that had been cancelled. The flowers themselves were long since dead.

‘How did you get on with the lycra ladies?’ he asked Murfin, who was waiting in the car.

‘They’re a bit self-obsessed.’

‘They didn’t notice anything?’

‘Nope. And, worse than that, they weren’t interested in me. Still, I got a coffee out of it. No cake, obviously. What about you, Ben?’

‘I met a trainspotter.’

‘Well, the afternoon wasn’t entirely wasted, then. Did you get his autograph?’

‘Better — I got a film.’

‘You’re hoping to get evidence that Quinn was at Hope? A bit of a long shot, isn’t it?’

Yes, of course it was. And it still wouldn’t answer the big question: where did Quinn go after he left Rebecca Lowe’s house at Aston? Back to the station? If so, he might have retraced his route and returned to his mother’s home in Hathersage. Alternatively, he could have stayed on the train and travelled as far as Sheffield, or crossed the tracks and been in Manchester within an hour.

In either case, it would be difficult to track him down. No known associates of Quinn’s lived in either city, so there was nowhere to start. DCI Kessen could ask for Quinn’s details to be circulated to all the B amp;Bs, hostels and cheap hotels — but there must be hundreds of them, possibly thousands. And what about the railway and coach stations? The airports, even? How much money did Quinn have with him, anyway? Might his mother have subbed him, handed over her life savings to help him get clear? Could she have found enough for an airline ticket? Nearly two days had passed since Rebecca Lowe had been killed. In theory, Mansell Quinn could be anywhere in the world by now.

Cooper shook his head. There was only one consolation. Any one of these scenarios might make Quinn more difficult to find — but at least it would mean he was out of Derbyshire for a while, and therefore not a threat to anyone else he might have on his list. But in his heart, Cooper felt that Quinn was still around.

He looked at the Ordnance Survey map he kept in the car, locating Aston and then the railway station half a mile away down the slopes of Win Hill. The station was a long way out of Hope village. That was because instead of continuing up the Hope Valley, the line took a shallow curve to follow the course of the River Noe and crossed a series of small bridges before it met the cement works spur. Trains had to pass over three unmade roads leading to farms or isolated homes. He could see some of the names on the map — Farfield Farm, Birchfield Park, the Homestead.

And there, just a little way to the north of Hope station, less than a mile west of Rebecca Lowe’s house, was the track that led to Wingate Lees. The Proctors’ caravan park.

Cooper shivered, though he wasn’t cold. Thunder flies had coated the windscreen of his car, dying slowly in their dozens on the hot glass. He tried to clear them away, but his wipers smeared them into a sticky mess, leaving greasy swirls embedded with black specks. It took several minutes before he could see clearly enough to drive back through Hathersage.